Papervision 2.0 with these effects and if it is as pluggable as it seems is very good for games that lighting is a key component or effects. Imagine a game that can customize weapons with 2d effects in 3d, or rocket boosters, or fireworks or all kinds of inspiring things like changing the mood or environment such as fog, lighting etc… If you start taling about adding physics to all this it just gets too fun. Effects have always been there and around, but making this possible to have a semi-standard way to do this and if it is pluggable, this can lead to many engine advancements.

I think the PV3d team additions of Tim Knip and Andy Zupko have been very good and zupko era in PV3d has begun. Tim Knip is also very active and helping to really organize the ascollada formats and performance stuff like only drawing what is on screen.

Who needs Hydra now? j/k although having this now in papervision leads me to see a very fun 2008 ahead for Flash, it is also, if as pluggable as it seems, a bit like a shaders kit.

All those older great 2d effects merging into 3d from the good old days (some still going very strong) of praystation, yugop, levitated, neave (great 2d tv effects in neave.tv) , flight404 (moved to processing) and many others. And a new era of zupko [pv3d], mr. doob, unitzeroone [pv3d], fabrice [away3d] and many more a new 2d effects in 3d platform is emerging. This kit for papervision3d by zupko and Hydra is making the future glowing full of bright points, and lots of effect explosions.

Let’s hope papervision3d 2.0 it is released soon and it has zupko’s effects code in there.

Take a look at this amazing custom 3d isometric engine for building 3d virtual worlds. This literally just popped up on the scene. It seems that they are progressing nicely, not sure how much it can handle in terms of multiple assets but they have a sample of a house and many effects such as lighting (day+night changes), interpolation, zooming levels etc. They are using their own custom 3d engine and texturing system but it is probably highly inspired by the new 3d engines available out there.

Now we have all the techs in one engine. Now we also can add bump-mapping and unique lighting FX (say, some green light on a wall near the grass). The engine has some optimization potential, but speed is mainly based on a texture quality settings.

It is supposed that all the objects will be in a 1 pixel = 1 centimeter scale.

Keys:

Spacebar — change daytime

Mouse wheel — change scale

Shift + wheel — tex quality

Ctrl + wheel — lightmap quality

Alt + wheel — groung quality

Q — tex interpolation on/off

The real-time lighting and 3d aspects of this look very promising. There are strong limitations to bulk in 3d in flash, for instance if you had a view with 100-200 homes and zoomed out with this I would like to see the performance then. Amazing work by this Russian development team.

Sascha over at hexagonstar aka h1dd3n.r350urc3 has created a very cool AS3 Animated Bitmap Class. You might be asking, why would you need this, you already have movieclip animation and time-based animation? Well when making games sometimes you want to lock in a certain framerate or create assets/sprites (in the classical sense) you know will be pixel based that you need to lock their framerate say at 24 while the flash application can run much faster when you need to base off frame-based animation or enterframe situations as your game tick().

In game development sometimes the platform outspeeds the designed activity such as back in the day when the “turbo” button appeared on the 33MHz computers from 16MHz. DOS games built without this knowledge were unplayable because they were so fast. Flash with AS3 is all about performance and speed and at some point controlling that for a pixel based 2d game or iso game might be necessary if you need the rest of the SWF to run faster. You can also do time based animation rather than frame-based animation but there are always times when this could

This class helps situations when you have to have an animated bitmap sequence but don’t want to include all the files for each frame, rather you put them all in one and the SWF export is much smaller and this is always good.

You can download the class including demo source code and demo image here.

Be sure to head on over to hexagonstar and h1dd3n.r350urc3 because there is a sample there and also a photoshop CS script to help create these and adds a nice little capability to any game development pipeline.

From Sascha:

What are the advantages over using a generic MovieClip? When writing games you might have several animated graphics (also called sprites, but not related to the AS3 Sprite class) that should run with a different framerate than the game’s global framerate. Let’s say your game runs with a global framerate of 99 and you put several animated sprites into your game that were created for playing back with a framerate of 24. With a MovieClip all those sprites would also play with a framerate of 99 which means they play way too fast. However with an AnimatedBitmap you can set every framerate individually. There are a couple of other advantages like that a Bitmap is more lightweight than a MovieClip and it has a isPlaying() method. Also it changes the way of how to embed assets. Instead of embedding many files for one animation only one image for a whole animation sequence is embedded which has positive effects on the file size. The ring sequence used in the demo has 21 frames that use 102Kb as single images but only 44Kb when they are combined to one image.

Sandy is a flash 3d engine that has been out just a little longer than Papervision3D. The code for Sandy is very clear and it is a great engine. I have experimented with it and found it to be a bit slower it seems that papervision but it has great tools, including an extra 3ds file importer in addition to the Collada and ASE formats that most flash 3d engines support.

Using Perlin Noise is very common in 3d engines to draw large terrains and realistic terrains for 3d games or simulations. This technique makes it very easy to make dynamic terrains or randomly generated terrains, watereffects, fire, clouds, whatever your need.

Who’s got the textures and cool chrome shiny 3d objects in Flash? There have been lots of materials work recently from papervision list developers and away3d developers (away3d is a branch of Papervision3D) and recently it is heating up a bit.

But when it comes to environmental mapping and true 3d reflection that might be simply stretching Flash to a limit that might require hardware acceleration but that isn’t stopping some.

I am not sure if environmental mapping will every be possible on a large scale without hardware acceleration. Pushing the limits could help influence Adobe to the market direction. But then again I never thought I would see the level of 3d in flash that we have and maybe in 2-3 years with multi-core processors it will be possible.

Here’s a snapshot of the current materials and environmental mapping (fake and real attempts).

I think that for games and flash effects faking it or real environmental mapping will have to be judged by what is needed for your purpose. I think that Flash player on software rendering can only go so far. So if you have real-time environmental reflections and surroundings it doesn’t always make your gameplay better and it won’t make your demo better if it means removing assets in other areas to make up for the performance drain of software rendering and the pressures it puts on the processor or browser plug-in.

You can still make really killer effects with baked animations, fake environmental mapping, faked dynamic real-time lighting and other effects. Flash, nor silverlight, will not be able to match hardware rendered shaders, per pixel lighting and physics anytime soon. But people are making good progress on this. I think it would be great if hardware acceleration were added to both Silverlight and Flash, with that, a brand new massive game market online, and it will be game on!

*drawlogic is authored by Ryan Christensen of *drawlabs and *drawcode, both dedicated to taking ideas to ship doing entertainment focused web, mobile and desktop game and interactive development projects.